


An Explorer of Delirium

by Edonohana



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21864922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/pseuds/Edonohana
Summary: Delirium gets a visitor.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 62
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2019





	An Explorer of Delirium

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



Delirium found the explorer striding confidently through her domain, which was not how most visitors came to it. Stumbling, staggering, reeling, dancing, crawling, running screaming—those sorts of ing words.

He was a portly man wearing a funny thick hat and a walrus moustache, holding a magnifying glass. As she approached him, he stopped to examine first a floating scrap of scarlet song, then the inscription on the pointy time thingie at the center of her realm.

She peered over his shoulder, startling him.

“My word!” he exclaimed.

“Those are _my_ words,” Delirium said. “At least, they’re my pointy thingie’s words.”

“It’s a sundial,” he said. She could tell he liked explaining things. Words hovered over his head, glistening and swelling and then exploding with tiny popping sounds. They said, HE LIKES EXPLAINING THINGS. “It tells the time of day. Look, you can read it by the shadow.”

Delirium looked. “It’s journey o’clock.”

The explorer checked with his magnifying glass. “Indeed it is. How charming. What a brave new world this is.”

“You like my place! Most people who come don’t like it. Or maybe they do, but they’re too busy screaming to tell me.” Delirium seized his arm. “We must explore it together, forever and ever and ever.”

He looked as if he liked that idea. HE LIKES THAT IDEA, said the words over his head before they vanished in tiny orange-and-black striped starbursts.

“That would be marvelous, little miss,” he said. “But we may not have time. You see, it’s impossible to read in dreams. But I can read the sundial’s inscription quite easily, so I must be very near to waking.”

“Oh, but this isn’t my brother’s realm,” Delirium said. “You’re delirious, not dreaming.”

“Am I?” HE IS GIVING THAT SERIOUS THOUGHT popped into a shower of droplets that smelled of regret. “Yes, perhaps I am. I wonder what it means, then, that I can read.”

“What does it say?” Delirium asked. To her fractured vision, the inscription was everything it might ever be, carved deep as time and smelling of starlight and blood.

“FRUCTUS FUGIT,” he read, and laughed. “Do you get the joke? Sundials often say TEMPUS FUGIT, which means ‘time flies.’ FRUCTUS FUGIT means ‘fruit flies.’”

Delirium held out her hands. A score of tiny bananas, mangoes, dragonfruit, and custard apples took flight, flapping their fragrant wings.

“It seems that I can not only read, but understand Latin and make puns," he said. "I suspect that means I am near to recovery. I’ll have to say goodbye then, little miss. What a shame. I would love to talk to you more.”

“Oh, me too,” said Delirium. “You could tell me more words to put on my time spike sun thingie!”

But he had vanished.

Delirium snatched a silver koi-shaped balloon from the air and tilted it until its side showed the explorer waking up under a mosquito net, pale and sweating and far thinner than he had appeared in her realm.

“My word,” he said to the doctor bending over him. “I had no idea delirium could be so delightful.”

Delirium thought _he_ was delightful. She made sure his malaria recurred soon. He always enjoyed their visits, and so did she until she kept his fever going too long and then her sister came and took him.

Her sister Death, that was. The explorer had never had any dealings with Despair.


End file.
